Organizing Music

The performance of identity in Chinese popular music Groenewegen, J.W.P. Citation Groenewegen, J. W. P. (2011, June 15). The performance of identity in Chinese popular music. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/17706 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the License: Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/17706 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). Chapter 5: Organizing Music §1 Evolution “Huh-ooohw,” hovers an unstable, low male voice, “huh-eeehw.” A sudden Mountain-Song-like movement lifts the melody to a high pitch: like a rubber band stretched and then released, the voice howls: “ee-oo.” It remains high, but the volume now wavers and decreases, into a nasal falsetto. “Ii- ih-i-i,” on the last bit of breath. Silence again, a loud sigh “whiiiy,” followed by high, barely audi- ble, “e-e-e” sounds. Low again: “whoo-oo-ee.” The melody now jumps back and forth between almost painfully high and low registers, while simultaneously working the overtones through changes of the vowel. Silence, another sigh, followed by a glissando. The sixth phrase is relatively conven- tional – a few drawn-out high notes with only microtonal fluctuations, briefly interrupted by a sudden dive into lower registers. Then the glockenspiel enters with a quiet tremolo. On Taoism 道极 (1985) begins with composer Tan Dun singing the germ cell of the composition. A bass clarinet and bass bassoon take turns developing the melodic line provided by the voice, render- ing the music almost monophonic: a single calligraphic-melodic line divided over the three solo in- struments employs a palette of tone-colors on a canvas of strings.1 The seven phrases of the open- ing, the seventh accompanied by the glockenspiel, also foreshadow the division of the thir- teen-minute composition into seven parts. Variations of the vocal ‘refrain’ mark transitions between the composition’s noncentric fields – ‘verses’ in which sounds seem to meander more or less without direction – and its clusters, in which the music becomes dense, erupting in volume and speed.2 Tan Dun is trained in Western art music, and On Taoism resonates with its esthetics. In the words of Richard Middleton: For traditional Western music aesthetics, as it emerged from the Enlightenment period, the individuality of each successive work should aim to guarantee what the artist’s creative method is set upon, namely, a means of exploring, modeling, representing development – personal, social, technical. This Bildungsroman mentality, not without power, still, even in pop music criticism, gave rise in the nineteenth century to two predominant interpretative models: music being related to narrative, on the one hand, [and] organicism on the other, with both cases governed by the Leitmotif of evolutionary change.3 In this chapter I will focus on the evolutionary production of Chinese popular music. I use evolutionary to refer to any process that repeatedly goes through reproduction, variation and selection. These three steps also inform the division of this chapter in three main sections. Chinese popular music is made by reproducing sounds, variating songs and selecting stars. 1 Kouwenhoven 1991:14, 27. 2 Utz 2002: 373-6, see also Mittler 1997:355. 3 Middleton 2006:149. Chapter 5: Organizing Music 184 Organic Pieces Let me first briefly outline my approach. In the above quote from Middleton’s Voicing the Popular (2006), evolutionary change means progress, “a sense that time has a direction.” In this chapter, rather than the teleology of organicism and Social Darwinism, evolution implies change beyond and often at odds with the pursuits of (individual) human beings. Furthermore, I will argue that On Tao- ism shows that the creativity and originality of art music do not shield it from the modest reproduc- tions, variations and selections of evolutionary change, and indeed that art music performs the pos- sibility of an evolutionary approach to music that focuses on change rather than progress. On Taoism was inspired by funeral rituals and weeping songs from Hunan Province. Tan Dun recalls traveling back to his hometown after his grandmother, who had raised him, passed away: When I arrived, I noticed that the villagers had special Taoist practices. They sang, they sprinkled wine over the body of my grandmother, they talked to the body. This kind of ritual was something which I grew up with as a child, but which I later forgot about. 4 … After- wards, in Beijing, I began to think about it. In that period, I was regarding myself as a new kind of Zhuangzi [the author of an ancient Daoist classic]. I talked a lot of Zhuangzi and felt very proud. ... [I wrote On Taoism in a week,] I wanted to write something in a single breath, just like a kid singing for himself. Basically, I used ‘non-concept’ and ‘non-disci- pline’ as a concept.5 Tan Dun’s Daoism draws from syncretic popular religion, whose animism informs his views on the reciprocal rela- tion between organism and milieu, composer and sound. His later Organic Music 有機音樂 series renders this con- nection more explicit, through both explicit frames and the use of natural, everyday and timeless sounds of water, paper, stones and ceramics. In On Taoism, rather than working towards a climax, Tan alternates kaleidoscopic monophonism, sonic clusters and weeping refrains that emerge out of and immerse into silences that function as what I will call chaosmos after James Joyce and hundun 渾沌 in Daoist terms.6 According to early Daoism, the chaosmos ‘sprouts’ or ‘gives birth to’ 生 entities through intensity 气, spontaneity 自然, clustering 聚 and dispersal 散.7 Like ‘sprouting,’ this chapter’s title ‘organizing mu- Illustration 5.1: Tan Dun on a poster sic’ suggests the pre-existence of and continued nourish- announcing the performance of his ing interaction with a milieu, rather than creation ex nihi- Organic Music in MoMa, New York lo. in 2005. 4 The Tan’s lived in Simaochong 思茅冲 (Changsha area), near burial grounds. 5 Kouwenhoven 1991:17-18. 6 Hall 1978:271, 274; Needham 1956:40-41, 50-52; Kim 2000:33. 7 Hall 1978:271, 274. Chapter 5: Organizing Music 185 Disparate Elements The definition of music as organized sound goes back to the early 20th-century French-American composer Edgard Varèse.8 Varèse related his works to physics, mathematics and biology, compar- ing composition to the erratic formation of crystals out of a relatively limited variety of internal structures: There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is the consequence of this interaction. ... A composer, like all artists, is an organizer of disparate elements.9 Music as organized sound suggests the presence of directions or vectors in the sound matter that, once set to work, evolve of their own accord.10 Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (1987) offers a vocabulary to describe these processes on an abstract yet detailed level. I will present their insights in a somewhat simplified form, using the metaphor of cheese production. Our micro-chaosmos starts out with the emulsion of disparate elements we call milk. The milk also contains bacteria that convert milk sugar into lactic acid. As the milk turns sour, the first fragile curds sponta- cheese (organism) neously form. Enzymes such as rennet assist the curd’s crys- ------------ plane of cheese organization tal-like growth, incorporating more and more of the sur- orgde-org = becoming rounding elements into its organization. From the perspec- tive of the cheese-to-be, growing means organizing milk ------------ milk chaosmos globules into curd. The eventual form and taste of the cheese globules (body) depend on the milieu in which it comes into existence (salti- ness, sourness, microbes), as well as its successfulness in Illustration 5.2: schematic overview of cheese organization. this milieu (size, cogency). The final product carries the milk globules of its creation along. In reality, the coagulation of milk is irreversible. By contrast, in the more abstract theory of Deleuze and Guattari, “cheese” is only a temporary homeostasis. In terms of our necessarily limited metaphor, they argue that “cheese” relapses into milk continuously: The [cheese] organism is not at all the body, [the milk globules]; rather, it is a stratum on [the milk globules], in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedi- mentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the [milk globules], imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcen- dences. ... A perpetual combat between the [milk chaosmos], which frees the [milk 8 Based on Hoëne Wronsky’s definition of music as “the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound,” see Varèse 1966:17. On the next page he claims: “As far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music ‘organized sound’ and myself, not a musician, but a ‘worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities.’” 9 Varèse 1966:16, 18. Chou Wen-chung was born in 1923 in Shandong and emigrated to the United States in 1946, where he became one of Varèse’s very few students. In 1972 Chou became a professor at Columbia University and in 1978 he established the United States-China Arts Exchange, which invited promising graduates of the then-recently reopened PRC conservatories. He invited Tan Dun in 1982, but Tan only arrived in New York in 1986, one year after finishing On Taoism. He lives there still in 2010.

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